Digital music store

A digital music store is a business that sells

History

Early years

The first free, high-fidelity online music archive of downloadable songs on the Internet was the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA),^[1] which was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993.^[2] Sony Music Entertainment Japan launched the first digital music store in Japan on 20 December 1999, entitled Bitmusic, which initially focused on A-sides of singles released by Japanese domestic musicians.^[3][4]

The realization of the market for downloadable music grew widespread with the development of

In 2000, Factory Records entrepreneur Tony Wilson and his business partners launched an early online music store, Music33, which sold MP3s for 33 pence per song.^[6]

The major record labels eventually decided to launch their own online stores, allowing them more direct control over costs and pricing and more control over the presentation and packaging of songs and albums.

Undaunted, the record industry tried again.

In the early 2010s, online music stores—especially iTunes—experienced a marked increase in sales. Consumer spending shifted away from the purchase of CDs in favor of purchasing albums from online music stores, or more commonly, purchasing individual songs. The iTunes platform has been the main reason for this shift, as it originally sold every song in its library for 99 cents. Historically, albums would be sold for about five times the cost of a single, but iTunes was selling every song for a tenth of the price of an album. However, in order to increase album sales, iTunes instituted "Complete My Album", which offered a discounted price on the full album when a consumer had already purchased one or more songs. Furthermore, with the rising popularity of Cyber Monday, online music stores have further gained ground over other music distribution sources.^[10]

iTunes rolled out an Instant Gratification (instant grat) service, in which some individual tracks or

Compared to file sharing

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Much controversy surrounds file sharing, so many of these points are disputed.

Advantages of legal online stores

• The sale of licensed content adheres to
  copyright laws
• More consistent and higher-quality metadata, because the entering of the metadata is more centralized and done with more oversight.^{[dubious – discuss]}
• Music download companies are more accountable to users than creators of file-sharing programs
• A centralized repository of music makes it easier to find the songs you want.
• Notably, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs claimed in his introduction of the iTunes Store that downloading from file-sharers is theoretically working for less than minimum wage - "By spending an hour of your time to save less than four dollars, he calculated, 'you're working for less than minimum wage!'".^[15][16]

Disadvantages of online stores

• Many major online music stores only offer music in one audio format.
• Most online music stores sell music encoded in a lossy file format, compared to an audio CD. For the most part, music that is sold in lossy MP3 format is not sold at higher bit rate encoding.
• Few online music stores offer music in lossless, metadata-enabled formats such as
  ALAC, but instead stick to WAV files in which no metadata can generally be embedded. AIFF
  files with metadata are offered but in larger size files than FLAC or ALAC without advantage in sound quality. In contrast, lossless rips of CDs in FLAC format are widely available on the web for illegal downloading.
• Some stores use
  Digital Rights Management
  technology, which limits the use of music files on certain devices. The restrictions vary between different services, and sometimes even between different songs from the same service.
• Online stores charge for downloading songs and other content, whereas illegal file sharing does not have any fees (although illegal song downloaders may face fines and prosecution in some jurisdictions and illegal files may contain computer viruses)

Internet radio

Online music stores receive competition from online radio, as well as file sharing. Online radio is the free distribution of webcasts on the Internet via streaming. Listeners can create customizable "stations" based on a genre, artists, or song of their choice. Notable Internet Radio service providers are

• Comparison of digital music stores
• Music industry
• Open Music Model
• InMusic

References